‘Killbill Society’ resonates in its title with an eerie aura of a shady syndicate operating in the shadowy alleys of morbidity. On the contrary, it is John Keating of ‘Dead Poets Society’ imploring a scorched world to reassure itself in the poetry of love and life. It is a high-school literature classroom where Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ echoes with ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!’ while explaining the odyssey of life. The heart of ‘Killbill Society’ is the torrential conviction of just being in love. Connoisseurs will cleave apart the work of art with the science of filmmaking. Let’s transcend it. The laboratory has explained that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom form water, but it can never tell us how it is to be wet. This film tells us how it is to be in life and love.
Love and life are not linear flat narratives. There are inevitable mutations, digressions, transgressions and perversions. Poorna Aich, unbelievably breathed to life by Koushani Mukherjee, wades into the cesspool of glitz and glamour when her noxious live-in partner trickles out their intimate video to the unsparing world of social media. An astringent family and a quicksand society coerce her to choose death over life albeit through the trigger of a contract killer. The story prospers into a magnetic field of loving life and living love. For a world that is engineered to be brutally conscious of earthly possessions before tiptoeing into the unearthly realm of passion, it is a difficult proposition. But Srijit Mukherji marinates us into believing how ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust love morph into an enduring existence.
Mrityunjoy Kar, enigmatically engrossed in Parambrata Chatterjee, is irretrievably tied to fate with lymphocytopenia. However, the dreaded word cannot chew on the cells of love that grow with Poorna. For them, it is an arc of togetherness, a promise to abide by unto death did them part. Almost with the Byronic fervour of ‘Love and Death’.
Mrityunjoy is also an oxymoronic flag bearer of life and its zesty upheavals - a trader of death with the killer instinct to live. The story, though ceasing to be didactic, professes life as awe-inspiringly beautiful. Let it be in the graveness of a cemetery or the swansong of a jacuzzi. Let it be in the hypnotic grunge of Somlata’s voice or the charming elixir of Anupam’s words. How he sways Poorna from the brink of nothingness to the brim of fulfilment reaffirms life is bountiful. Living is contagious.
‘Killbill Society’ also underlines with relentless wit and wisdom that love doesn’t limit itself to stress on pelvic muscles and flaring in the groin. Love is emotionally expansive. A forever entity of lush sincerity. It is reinvigorated in those curtain moments where Koushani and Parambrata ensconced in the certitude of heights oversee the eternity and weave yarns of finality. The frames where finite microcosm merges into infinite macrocosm… The motions where love is frozen to ashes as in Pompeii…
Srijit’s opus is a statement of triumph. The couplet of life and love will have spasms of farce and throbs of melodrama. There may be a seesaw between Caesar and Rome, but Brutus will fail in the end, harming none in an alternate reality. The ultimate truth ought to be reserved for Koushani whose Poorna shines through as a thousand splendid suns. Perhaps for her Lord Byron wrote eons ago, ‘She walks in beauty, like the night; Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes’.
(The writer is a columnist and communication professional)